>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Silence ] >> Welcome everyone on a beautiful, real spring day here in Washington, D.C. My name is Rob Casper and I'm the head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress. I want to welcome you to our second literary birthdays event of the spring celebrating writer Vladimir Nabokov. First let me ask you to do what I'm going to do which is take your cell phones or any other electronic devices you may have and turn them off as they interfere with the recording of this event. And let me tell you a little bit about the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library. We are home to the poet laureate consultant in poetry and we put on literary readings, lectures and panels of all sorts throughout the year. If you would like to find out more about events like this, you can go pick up a 1 page upcoming event sheet and sign our sign-up sheet in the foyer. We also have books for sale in the foyer so, hopefully, you will buy some and get some signed after the event. I want to make a special shout-out, we have a number of wonderful people here in the audience including the Landon Center's Hybrid Forms class who came to learn more about Mr. Nabokov and support their professor so thanks, class, for coming. We're all thrilled to be here to honor one of America's great voices on what would have been his 115th birthday. You can read more about Nabokov and about our 2 featured readers, Dinaw Mengestu and Azar Nafisi in our print program which should be on your seat. We also have a listing of all the materials in our tabletop displays as a second printout which we're very excited about. But getting back to our featured readers, we're thrilled to have them here both as representatives of the district's rich literary community and as fellow immigrants celebrating our jubilee, one of America's great immigrant writers. Let me tell you a little bit about the program. Our 2 featured readers will read in alphabetical order from their favorite Nabokov selections and they will connect him to their own work. Following the readings, we have 2 curators here at the Library who've set up these displays, Alice Birney from our Manuscripts Division which, I think, is over here at the tabletop display for manuscripts. And Barbara Dash of our Rare Books and Special Collections Division and that tabletop display is over here. And then we'll say a little bit about the Nabokov materials in the collection and they'll talk a little bit about the invaluable work that both division do to ensure that future generations can connect to the Nabokovs of our time. To learn more about both divisions, you can visit their websites. For the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, it is www.loc.gov/rr/mss and for the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, it is also loc.gov/rr/rarebook. So now please join me in welcoming Dinaw Mengestu and Azar Nafisi. >> Good Afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here especially to read with Azar Nafisi and to have my wonderful students from Georgetown join me. The class I was teaching this semester was called Hybrid Forms and it's based partly on the idea that we oftentimes like to categorize literature in very sort of discreet spaces. So we have poetry here, fiction here and non-fiction there, but that some writers are able to traverse these boundaries and these borders and very few writers have done that as brilliantly as Nabokov did. And in honor of that particular class, I was going to read a brief passage from "Pale Fire". A few days later, however, namely on Monday, February 16, I was introduced to the old poet at lunch time in the faculty club. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda. I was invited to join him and 4 or 5 other eminent professors at his usual table, under an enlarged photograph of Wordsmith College as it was, stunned and shabby, on a remarkably gloomy summer day in 1903. His laconic suggestion that I "try the pork" amused me. I am a strict vegetarian, and I like to cook my own meals. Consuming something that had been handled by a fellow creature was, I explained to the rubicund convives, as repulsive to me as eating any creature, and that would include-- lowering my voice-- the pulpous pony-tailed girl student who served us and licked her pencil. Moreover, I had already finished the fruit brought with me in my briefcase, so I would content myself, I said, with a bottle of good college ale. My free and simple demeanor set everybody at ease. The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around, he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple. I was not yet used to the rather fatiguing jesting and teasing that goes on among American intellectuals of the inbreeding academic type and so abstained from telling John Shade in front of all those grinning old males how much I admired his work lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiousness. Instead I asked him about one of my newly acquired students who also attended his course, a moody, delicate, rather wonderful boy, but with a resolute shake of his hoary forelock, the old poet answered that he had ceased long ago to memorize faces and names of students and that the only person in his poetry class whom he could visualize was an extramural lady on crutches. "Come, come," said Professor Hurley, "do you mean, John, you really don't have a mental or visceral picture of that stunning blonde in the black leotard who haunts Lit. 202?" Shade, all his wrinkles beaming, benignly tapped Hurley on the wrist to make him stop. Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed 2 ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? "No," he said, "but why 2?" "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed. Despite a wobbly heart-- see Line 35-- a slight limp and a certain curious contortion in his method of progress, Shade had an inordinate liking for long walks, but the snow bothered him and he preferred, in winter, to have his wife call for him after classes with the car. A few days later as I was about to leave Parthenocissus Hall, or Main Hall, or now Shade Hall, alas, I saw him waiting outside for Ms. Shade to fetch him. I stood beside him for a minute on the steps of the pillared porch while pulling my gloves on, finger by finger, and looking away as if waiting to review a regiment. "That was a thorough job," commented the poet. He consulted his wristwatch. A snowflake settled upon it. "Crystal to crystal," said Shade. I offered to take him home in my powerful Kramler. "Wives, Mr. Shade, are forgetful." He cocked his shaggy head to look at the library clock. Across the bleak expanse of snow-covered turf, two radiant lads in colorful winter clothes passed, laughing and sliding. Shade glanced at his wristwatch again and, with a shrug, accepted my offer. I wanted to know if he did not mind being taken the longer way, with a stop at Community Center where I wanted to buy some chocolate-coated cookies and a little caviar. He said it was fine with him. From the inside of the supermarket, through a plate-glass window, I saw the old chap pop into a liquor store. When I returned with my purchases, he was back in the car reading a tabloid newspaper which I had thought no poet would deign to touch. A comfortable burp told me he had a flask of brandy concealed about his warmly coated person. As we turned into the driveway of his house, we saw Sybil pulling up in front of it. I got out with a courteous vivacity. She said, "Since my husband does not believe in introducing people, let us do it ourselves. You are Dr. Kinbote, aren't you? And I am Sybil Shade." Then she addressed her husband saying he might have waited in his office another minute. She had honked and called and walked all the way up, et cetera, et cetera. I turned to go, not wishing to listen to a marital scene, but she called me back. "Have a drink with us," she said, "or rather with me, because John is forbidden to touch alcohol." I explained I could not stay long as I was about to have a kind of little seminar at home followed by some table tennis with two charming identical twins and another boy, another boy. Henceforth I began seeing more and more of my celebrated neighbor. The view from one of my windows kept providing me with first-rate entertainment, especially when I was on the wait from some tardy guest. From the second story of my house, the Shades' living room window remained clearly visible so long as the branches of the deciduous trees between us were still bare. And almost every evening I could see the poet's slippered foot gently rocking. One inferred from it that he was sitting with a book in a low chair but one never managed to glimpse more than that foot and its shadow moving up and down to the secret rhythm of mental absorption in the concentrated lamplight. Always at the same time, the brown morocco slipper would drop from the wool-socked foot which continued to oscillate with, however, a slight slackening of pace. One knew that bedtime was closing in with all its terrors. That, in a few minutes, the toe would prod and worry the slipper and then disappear with it from my golden field of vision traversed by the black bendlet of a branch. And sometimes Sybil Shade would trip by with the velocity and swinging arms of one flouncing out in a fit of temper, and would return a little later, at a much slower gait having, as it were, pardoned her husband for his friendship with an eccentric neighbor. But the riddle of her behavior was entirely solved one night when, by dialing their number and watching their window at the same time, I magically induced her to go through the hasty and quite innocent motions that had puzzled me. Alas, my peace of mind was soon to be shattered. The thick venom of envy began squirting at me as soon as academic suburbia realized that John Shade valued my society above that of all other people. Your snicker, my dear Ms. C., did not escape our notice as I was helping the tired old poet to find his galoshes after that dreary get-together party at your house. One day I happened to enter the English Literature office in quest of a magazine with the picture of the Royal Palace in Onhava, which I wanted my friend to see, when I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked, "I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the great beaver." Of course, I am quite tall and my brown beard is of a rather rich tint and texture. The silly cognomen evidently applied to me, but was not worth noticing. And, after calmly taking the magazine from a pamphlet-cluttered table, I contented myself on my way out with pulling Gerald Emerald's bow-tie loose with a deft jerk of my fingers as I passed by him. There was also the morning when Dr. Nattochdag, head of the department to which I was attached, begged me in a formal voice to be seated, then closed the door. And having regained, with a downcast frown, his swivel chair, urged me "to be more careful." In what sense, careful? A boy had complained to his adviser. Complained of what, good Lord? That I had criticized a literature course he attended, a ridiculous survey of ridiculous works, conducted by a ridiculous mediocrity. Laughing in sheer relief, I embraced my good Netochka, telling him I would never be naughty again. I take this opportunity to salute him. He always behaved with such exquisite courtesy toward me that I sometimes wondered if he did not suspect what Shade suspected, and what only three people-- two trustees and the president of the college-- definitely knew. Oh, there were many such incidences. In a skit performed by a group of drama students, I was pictured as a pompous woman hater with a German accent, constantly quoting Housman and nibbling raw carrots. And a week before Shade's death, a certain ferocious lady at whose club I had refused to speak on the subject of "The Hally Vally", as she put it, confusing Odin's Hall with the title of a Finnish epic, said to me in the middle of a grocery store, "You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you," and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added, "What's more, you are insane." But let me not pursue the tabulation of nonsense. Whatever was thought, whatever was said, I had my full reward in John's friendship. This friendship was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed, especially when we were alone, by that gruffness which stems from what can be termed the dignity of the heart. His whole being constituted a mask. John Shade's physical appearance was so little in keeping with the harmonies hiving in the man, that one felt inclined to dismiss it as coarse disguise or passing fashion. For if the fashion of the Romantic Ages subtilized a poet's manliness by baring his attractive neck, pruning his profile and reflecting a mountain lake in his oval gaze. Present-day bards, owing perhaps to better opportunities of aging, look like gorillas or vultures. My sublime neighbor's face had something about it that might have appealed to the eye, had it been only leonine or only Iroquoian. But, unfortunately, by combining the two it merely reminded one of a fleshy Hogarthian tippler of indeterminate sex. His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if I regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation. I have one favorite photograph of him. In this color snapshot taken by a onetime friend of mine, on a brilliant spring day, Shade is seen leaning on a sturdy cane that had belonged to his aunt Maude. I am wearing a white windbreaker acquired in a local sports shop and a pair of lilac slacks hailing from Cannes. My left hand is half raised, not to pat Shade on the shoulder as seems to be the intention, but to remove my sunglasses which, however, it never reached in that life, the life of the picture. And the library book under my right arm is a treatise on certain Zemblan calisthenics in which I proposed to interest that young roomer of mine who snapped the picture. A week later he was to betray my trust by taking sordid advantage of my absence on a trip to Washington whence I returned to find that he had been entertaining a fiery-haired whore from Exton who had left her combings and reek in all three bathrooms. Naturally we separated at once and, through a chink in the window curtains, I saw bad Bob standing rather pathetically, with his crewcut and shabby valise and the skis I had given him, all forlorn on the roadside, waiting for a fellow student to drive him away forever. I can forgive everything, save treason. We never discussed, John Shade and I, any of my personal misfortunes. Our close friendship was on that higher, exclusively intellectual level where one can rest from emotional troubles, not share them. My admiration for him was, for me, a sort of alpine cure. I experienced a grand sense of wonder whenever I looked at him, especially in the presence of other people, inferior people. This wonder was enhanced by my awareness of their not feeling what I felt, of their not seeing what I saw, of their taking Shade for granted, instead of drenching every nerve, so to speak, in the romance of his presence. Here he is, I would say to myself, that is his head, containing a brain of a different brand than that of the synthetic jellies preserved in the skulls around him. He is looking from the terrace of Prof. C.'s house on that March evening at the distant lake. I am looking at him. I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon, John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce, at some unspecified date, an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse. And I experienced the same thrill as when, in my early boyhood, I once watched across the tea table in my uncle's castle a conjurer who had just given a fantastic performance and was now quietly consuming a vanilla ice. I stared at his powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and had now become fixed as a white carnation, and especially at his marvelous fluid-looking fingers which could, if he chose, make his poem-- make his spoon dissolve into a sunbeam by twiddling it or turn his plate into a dove by tossing up in the air. Shade's poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic. My gray-haired friend, my beloved old conjurer, put a pack of index cards into his hat and shook out a poem. To this poem we now must turn. My Foreword has been, I trust, not too skimpy. Other notes arranged in a running commentary will certainly satisfy the most voracious reader. Although those notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem. The reader is advised to consult with them first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them of course as he goes through its text and, perhaps, after having done with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture. I find it wise in such cases as this to eliminate the bother of back and forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together the pages with the text of the thing or, even more simply, purchasing two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent positions on a comfortable table. Not like the shaky little affair on which my typewriter is precariously enthroned now, in this wretched motor lodge, with that carousel inside and outside my head, miles away from New Wye. Let me state that, without my notes, Shade's text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his, being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work, with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word. [ Applause ] >> Such a pleasure to be here and with such a wonderful writer. I just wanted to tell you that Dinaw was not born when Nabokov died. So I want to tell you something which is very embarrassing for me, but I don't have much choice right now because I feel really like a character out of a Nabokov book. And I tell you what happened to me. I read the E-mail that you sent me a long time ago and my interpretation of it was that we have to do some reading from Nabokov. And I thought about it very hard and seriously and came up with the first part of "Pnin" and the last part of "Pnin" when he goes into the sunset, when he drives into the sunset. And I had it all ready and then last night, when I re-read your E-mail, and I got-- I thought, God I've got everything right. I had forgotten to give him what he wanted me to give him. And that he really didn't mean you should read from Nabokov, but that you should talk about why Nabokov-- what Nabokov meant to you. How did you connect to Nabokov and then read parts from Nabokov. I got up at 6:30 this morning and started doing that and until I came here. And I discovered that, no, I should have done the marvelous job that Dinaw did. So then I thought maybe this is the mischievous ghost of Nabokov doing these things to me. Because, if you remember, honestly I was just thinking about that when we were walking to this room that, if you remember the first chapter of "Pnin" and, by now, I almost know it by heart because I've been practicing it, is that Pnin is on the train. And he's going to give a talk. But what he doesn't know is that he has checked the wrong timetable and he's on the wrong train. And so the refrain from "Pnin" is constantly the fact that Pnin, what he doesn't know, that he's on the wrong train. And I have to apologize to all of you for being on the wrong train. And so this is what I did this morning. Because the first question that came to mind was that we're here at this amazing place, Library of Congress, a reminder to the people in Congress why they're there to begin with. And that's, why are we all here from all these different parts of the world? I mean, you all, even though like the 2 of us do not immediately come from another country, but you all have your roots somewhere else to celebrate an American Russian writer who spent the last part of his life in Montreal and I found the best quote actually from Nabokov when he would talk to his students and he would say, "Readers are born free and they ought to remain free." And I thought that, if I'm going to be talking about Nabokov and why I want to celebrate him today and his birthday today, it is because that idea of freedom. And the way he links the idea of freedom to the idea of reading. And the fact that books are like hothouse flowers, they just wither and die if there are not millions readers all over the world that would constantly remind us and constantly reinterpret and re-read these books. That is why they remain fertile. And then I remembered how, when I wrote "Reading Lolita in Tehran" a lot of people would say, "Why would a woman coming from the Islamic Republic of Iran write about this guy?" The whole point, of course, about Nabokov and they would try to draw a moral or a political response out of why I wrote about Lolita. But the whole point, again, is that Nabokov talks about fancy's [inaudible] when it is futile. The whole point of reading like the Persian Poet whom he talks about, the sun is the reason for the sun, literature is the reason for literature. It is like life, you cannot, as Nabokov constantly reminds us, separate literature from life. And when he says that, in "Lolita" that he has no moral in tow, it doesn't meant that he's immoral or he doesn't care about what happens to humanity. What he means is that he does not have a political agenda or a moral-- or a political or a moral agenda in tow. And then he talks-- and I love this part especially right in front of Congress, I'm really mad at these people-- so you know, so I'm sorry that I'm coming out like this. He says, "Governments come and go, only the trace of genius remains." And that is the whole point. You will remain, we don't know who in the Congress will remain. We will remember his name, but I don't know how many names we will remember over there. So this is the whole idea, this is why we read and we celebrate Nabokov today. I think it is for the same reason. And so what I thought, and the reason I would like to thank you, this is the sacred book, this is the "Lolita" 1957 that you have allowed me to read from. And I would like to thank you. I'm sure that spirit of Nabokov is just laughing at me and appreciating you. He talks about what the book is all about and that is why I think that writers, when they are genuinely faithful to the act of writing, when they don't have any moral in tow, they are the most subversive. They are not only subversive of the politics of their time, they are subversive of the brutality of both life and man. And that is what he says, he says that, in the afterword to reading "Lolita", he says "Lolita" has no moral in tow. For me, a work of fiction exists insofar, insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss. That is a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art and this is how he defines art, curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy is the norm. So who could say that "Lolita" does not have a moral in tow? It is kindness and ecstasy. It is that feeling of empathy, it is wonderful reading Dinaw did about John Shade, you know, saying pity is the password, pity is the key. And so no writer-- no great writer can write without writing about the integrity and the dignity of the individual and the need for the freedom of the individual, but also about the fact that that dignity, that freedom cannot come to us without connecting to others. This whole Ayn Randian philosophy that we see today about greed and individualism, this is not the kind of individualism the writers in this country, or the writers who come to this country, are searching for. It is about the-- all his books are about the dignity of the individual. I chose-- have 10 minutes or so-- I chose to talk and to quote mainly from "Lolita", although I would have loved to do it from "Pnin". Pnin is-- he's just a heartbreaker, you know, in so many ways. I chose to do it from "Lolita" because I want to come back to this subject of readers and the importance of readers. And we all forget how much in this book, in reading "Lolita", he is teasing the reader. And he's also talking about the fact that the responsibility, once you start reading, then the responsibility is also with you. You, the reader, become complicit in the book and the way you will interpret the book, the way you would look at the book would, you know, also change both the book and you and, hopefully, the world around you. You notice that all the time he's talking about, I think, 4 to 6 times in reading "Lolita", he addresses the reader as "ladies and gentlemen of the jury." You know, it is fantastic. We have a fantastic novelist among us. I mean, I think that partly we, as readers, become ladies and gentlemen of the jury. And this is what individual responsibility is all about, the fact that you constantly have to not just question the world, but propose yourself as a question mark. You have to confront yourself, another fantastic writer, James Baldwin says is that you cannot confront the world unless you confront yourself. And this is what Nabokov does in this book with the reader and I think that is why some of us find this book intolerable, we can't read it. Because it shows an aspect of us that we do not want to remember, that we want to forget. And so very, very shortly I tell you why Nabokov became so big in my life when I was living in Iran. And, since I love to embarrass my former students, 2 of my students in "Reading Lolita" are sitting there. I didn't know they'd come today, I had not told them, did I? That is Mona [phonetic], our poet and that is Nima [phonetic], her husband. So the whole point with Nabokov, for me, was that when I went in Iran and I started re-reading all these books. Now in the light of the situation in the Iran and Nabokov came very close to me because all his books, almost, are about the state of exile, including exile within your own home which is the most painful, the most humiliating form of exile that you can have. And I started teaching, at first, very cautiously and with a lot of worries "Invitation to a Beheading". And I was worried that my students would not-- I mean the language in that book is so difficult. And I thought that my students would not understand it. They loved it. Not only did they love it, they really got mad at me for not introducing it to them any sooner and for not teaching Nabokov. They thought that I wanted to keep him all to myself. And so then, the next book that I taught was "Pnin". And "An Invitation to a Beheading" I don't think we have time to read from all of them. If you remember, it is about one individual, Cincinnatus C, living in a sort of dystopian society-- utopian society-- where everybody in this society is supposed to be transparent. The only person who is not transparent, who is opaque, is Cincinnatus C. And he tries to hide it, you know, but everybody sees him, you know. And like most of the signs, they point the finger at him. And so people who are opaque, in a very beautiful ceremony-- "beautiful" quote/unquote-- they're first jailed and then they wait for execution. And you invite everyone to the execution, it's an invitation to a beheading. And the rules of the jail is that the jailer and the jailed should be very friendly, they should love one another. There are ten-- they're commandments on the prison wall that the jailer should not have forbidden dreams. It should not dream, that you know. So the whole idea of "Invitation to a Beheading" is this idea of the relationship between that one individual who refuses to become part of the crowd. And, you know, and his jailer. And the first-- the beginning-- Oh God, I wish I could read this for you, but it would take too long. The whole idea at the beginning is that Cincinnatus and the jailer start doing a dance together. And I wanted to name this book, "Dancing with Your Jailer" because one of the things that we so often do, whether we live in a democracy or in a totalitarian system, is that despite the fact that we were victims, we become like our jailer. And we dance with the jailer. And so the whole point for Cincinnatus is that, if he wants to get out of jail, he has to come out of that circle. He has to go to another domain. He cannot become like his oppressor, he has to be someone else. And the real genuine Cincinnatus is the one who writes. There are 2 Cincinnatuses, one who is scared, who dances with the jailer and the other one who writes. And at the end, of course, he discovers that all of this is a sham. That the jailer, once he starts to become real, and at his execution, you know, he keeps telling himself, by myself, by myself. And he's relieved. So it was one book and then "Lolita" was the book that I taught to that female class that, you know, where we could talk about everything. And I hate to use any book-- I think it is really shameful for any quote/unquote "critic" to use a book as an allegory, to ask the book to be a copy of their life. So that is not what I was trying to do in "Reading Lolita". I was trying to say that there are so many levels of reading in "Reading Lolita". And the empathy that comes out of that reading is so universal that this man who lived in Russia that died a long, long time ago, he could connect to a group of young girls who had never left the Islamic Republic of Iran. And I think that is the beauty of it and that is the miracle of art, that it transcends in this way and in this manner. And so, in "Lolita", basically what Humbert does-- and I want to read from him-- what Humbert does with Lolita, you remember that the first page of "Lolita" begins by him saying that actually there was another Lolita, Annabel Lee. There was another girl that I was in love with when I was young and she died young and, from then on, he tries every young nymphet that he sees, he wants that image of his lost love to become, you know, the present person. And he-- and the biggest crime he commits is try to turn Lolita into something that she's not. This is the whole thing. And that is what he says about her. She says, what I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita, perhaps more real than Lo, having no will, no consciousness, indeed, no real life of her own. So, you know, this is the crime, this is the crime. This [inaudible], the fact that-- and this is the relationship between writing and freedom. Now whether you are an Ayatollah in the Islamic Republic of Iran who says that-- who first of all what Humbert does is take away from Lolita her past. She-- he denies him-- her of, you know, whatever puny past, a kitsch mother who, you know, he makes full, a dead father, but they're her mother and her father. She loves to put, I don't know, the equivalent of Britney Spears and all those people in her room. And she falls for Humbert because she reminds him of a movie star. You know, she's just an ordinary-- no offense to ordinary American girls, no one is ordinary. But she's just a young girl. And who are you to take away that youth from her and turn her into an object of your fancy, an object of your imagination. And so if you can imagine that, when you talk about something that is universal, it applies to other places. So what they did in Iran with the citizens was not having Islam. Islam, like Christianity, is a religion. There's so many different interpretations of it. There's some of the most liberal minded and democratic people in my book, actually, are Muslims. But, like some Christians in this country, or like some non-Christians in this country, the problem with the regime was that it said that everybody's Islam should be like my Islam. And that everybody, no matter whether they're Christian or Atheist or Jews or Baha'is or Zoroastrians should be like us. And the symbol became women. Women are such amazingly good symbols, aren't they? You know, so the veil was not about religion. We-- Mona and I in Iran were not worried because we think the veil is bad. What bothered us was the fact that someone else should tell you how you should relate to your God or how you should not have a God, that when they force all women to wear the veil, then the veil loses its religious meaning. It becomes a political symbol, it becomes a symbol of the state. It is like saying that all people in America are Baptists, Southern Baptists. They should all go to church and wear the cross. Then Christianity doesn't have any meaning to you. We need to have Jerry Falwell and we need to have Michelle Obama and they both say they're Christians, you know? So anyway, to make this very long story short and I am missing all my-- okay, so what I'm trying-- this is the last one-- and then I have one last one and we're finished. The whole point about Nabokov that is worrying-- not Nabokov, of Humbert is that he's a seducer and he's trying to seduce not Lolita. In fact, Lolita knows what kind of a crap he is. He's trying to seduce us, the readers. He's a poet, he's, you know, very distinguished. Monsters do not come saying, "We are monsters. Beware". Monsters are poets and Ayatollahs and Congressmen and Presidents and heads of some corporations and Justices and Supreme Courts. They come in all size and shapes and they are very attractive people. They can really seduce us with words and that is why a democracy needs its citizens to be thinking constantly and questioning because, otherwise, they will be seduced by the monsters. Now this monster, like all monsters, makes Lolita into a slut. She says, she says frigid, gentle women of the jury, she seduced me. The whole point is that that is how it works. She chews gum, she likes to wear, I don't know, platform shoes, she's shallow so she deserves to be flogged in Iran. She deserves to be married at the age of 9. She deserves to be stoned to death, she deserves to be raped by her stepfather. Now Vera Nabokov, in response to all of these, has something beautiful about Lolita. She says Lolita discussed by the papers from every possible point of view except one, that of beauty and pathos. And she says in her diary, critics prefer to look for moral symbols, justification, condemnation or explanation of Humbert Humbert's predicament. I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child's helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH and her heart-rending courage all along culminating in that squalid but, essentially, pure and healthy marriage and her letter and her dog and that terrible expression on her face when she-- I think that I wrote this-- anyway, nevermind. But anyway-- no I'm sorry, I mean I'm trying to go find this fast, but anyway. To make a point is that when you look at this through Lolita's eyes, you see that she's the real victim here. And this is no celebration as one of the greatest critics America had, Lionel Trilling, whom I love-- this is not just a simple love story. You know, there's more to it than just that. And, at the end, what humanizes Humbert is the fact that he realizes he's been blind. And when he's listening to young children singing, he tells-- he says that what I realized I have done, my crime was the fact that the voice of Lolita was missing from the voice of those children. That is what-- and he says that no one can convince me that, that, you know, I'm not a monster because of what I have done. And so this is the point, I think. Now when Ayatollah Khomeini talked about us, he called us-- and, of course some friends in the academia do the same thing, but they're not Ayatollah, you know they call you an imperialist agent. He talked about somebody who wears a tie as a westernized Americanized, you know, agent. He talked about these people bringing to our country American Islam as if these people, our people, do not have the mind and the heart to choose their own kind of Islam, you know. It is a really condescension towards the victim, towards the people of Iran that someone else should be speaking for them because these people come in all shapes. And so the point about Humbert is that I will read you one small thing from "Lolita". She wants her mother. He has taken her to a motel, he has raped her and he does it time and time again. And she tells him, "Why can't I call my mother if I want to?" "Because," he answers, "your mother is dead." That night, at the hotel, they have separate rooms but, in the middle of the night, she came stomping into mine and we made up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go. This is the most heartbreaking, one of the most heartbreaking scenes in modern literature, the fact that she has nowhere to go. And so if you imagine that young girl in, you know, any part of the world this is happening in, Africa, in Middle East, in America, in, you know, Europe, where people feel completely lonely and helpless and where they have nowhere to go, but into their jailer's arms, you know. This is how literature subverts you. And so I wanted to sort of end this by saying that, when reading "Lolita", we discovered and this was a class discover, it wasn't just my discovery, we discovered that we're responsible as readers. And once we read and we know, then we're witness. And once you are a witness, you can't remain silent. Once you know, you can't remain silent. And the-- so we're all now American citizens and it is not just happening out there, it always happens here as well. Sinclair Lewis's book, "It Can't Happen Here", it can happen anywhere and it has already happened. The way we are belittling literature and arts, the way we are forgetting about imagination, there's a price to be paid for it. Saul Bellows said that a country that has lost its love of poetry and its soul is a country that faces death. So Nabokov came to this country, we all came to this country because it was built on a dream and because we felt that this dream can be actualized. And that is where immortality lies, in the dream that the history offers us and in the glory of imagination. He has something wonderful on American advertising. I won't read it but, basically, he says that the problem with the rich philistinism, anything from American advertisements is not due to other, to other exaggerating or inventing the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the [inaudible] of human happiness is purchasable. And its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser. This is what we are taught today that money is ennobling. And it ennobles our souls. Well "Lolita" has other things in mind and I will end with "Lolita" if I can find it. If not, that's okay. Humbert, at the end, is addressing Lolita and he says, "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art and this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." And this is the only immortality against the tyranny of death and tyranny of man that we can share. It is the works of imagination from Agamemnon to Lolita. Thank you so much and I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. [ Applause ] >> Ms. Nafisi, that's a hard act to follow. Luckily I don't have to tell you what's on the display tables because each of you has a list of the manuscripts over there and the books over there. So I will just be very brief and tell you the-- I, Vladimir Nabokov, hereby give to the United States of America for inclusion in the collections of the Library of Congress and for administration therein by the authorities thereof a collection of my papers which were received in said Library on December 17, 1958 which were contained in 1 box at that time when received under the following conditions that for a period of 50 years-- one of the longest restrictions, from the date of the signing of this state instrument which was June '59, the papers shall be available only by my written permissions, or that of my wife, Vera Nabokov, or that of my son, Dmitri Nabokov, that if none of the 3 persons mentioned in condition 1 above survives for the entire period of restricted access, access to the collection shall be granted to qualified scholars by permission of the Chief of the Manuscript Division. I hereby dedicate to the public, the literary rights in my letters and other unpublished writings in these papers. And in other collections of papers in the custody of the Library of Congress, except that these literary rights shall be reserved to me, my wife, Vera Nabokov and my son, Dmitri Nabokov for this period of restricted access. In witness thereof, 30 May of '59 in the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, Vladimir Nabokov and co-signed by the Librarian of Congress, June 23, 1959. And those restrictions kept me and my predecessors very, very busy for that time because there were exceptions and correspondence had to be drafted with each one of those requests. And first I dealt with Vera Nabokov and then Dmitri who has a very hands-on approach and sometimes he wasn't around. So I was much relieved when the 50 years were up. I know of only 1 longer restriction period than that. And so when he signed that, I think he realized that he was gold. And he had a right to treat it that way and it's one of the shortest instruments of gift in my experience. We will be behind the tables to talk with you about individual items, correspondence and manuscripts cards mostly and first editions and rare books there. [ Applause ] >> Thanks to both of our readers and thanks to Alice and Barbara. Please come up and check out the materials here and please go in the foyer and pick up books and ask our great readers to sign them. And, most of all, have a good Nabokov birthday. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.